The invention relates to tweezers, in particular for handling histological preparations, preferably thin tissue specimens, with two legs connected elastically at one end, and with tips formed at the other free end of the legs, which together form an engagement area, wherein a central area serves for holding and actuating the legs in order to bring the tips into an arrangement next to one another or contact with each other.
Tweezers generally means a tool that serves for gripping small objects. Tweezers usually consist of two legs joined to one another which can be made of metal, plastic, fiberglass-reinforced plastic or ceramic. The legs, or rather their tips, can be moved toward each other by means of slight pressure. When the tips of the tweezers make contact, the tweezers are closed and grasp.
The term “tip” is to be understood in its broadest sense. It concerns the free end of the two legs, which may be pointed in the literal sense of a tip, but also round, polygonal or some other shape. The legs of the tweezers can have a variety of cross-sections. They can be straight or curved. The inside of the tips can also be grooved to engage the particles more effectively.
Histology is concerned with the study of biological samples and should be understood as a branch of medicine or biology, and more precisely a branch of anatomy or pathology. The histologist examines tissue samples, manufacturing micrometer-thin, usually colored tissue sections and examining them under the microscope. The fine, small tissue sections need to be handled in order to prepare them, embed them and/or position them on a microscope slide. Tweezers with suitably shaped tips are customarily used for handling them.
In order not to damage the delicate tissue samples, they may come into contact only with suitably temperature-controlled tools/handling devices. If the handling device, e.g. the tweezers, are a metallic object with a high thermal conductivity, they tend to rapidly assume the temperature of a cold tabletop, for instance. This is harmful to the samples. The remedy for this problem so far has been to place the tweezers on a hotplate and then use the tempered tweezers. This is cumbersome and, moreover, does not guarantee a homogeneous tweezer temperature. Furthermore, the tweezers cool off quickly owing to their lack of sufficiently great mass. It is not possible to reproducibly handle biological samples in this manner.